The Pastoral Care of Women in Late Medieval England

The Pastoral Care of Women in Late Medieval England by Beth Allison Barr adds new dimensions to our understanding of the pastoral care of women in late-medieval England. It is also a valuable addition to the developing field of medieval gender studies. Employing the insights and methods of gender analysis, Barr attempts to illuminate women's experiences by recovering male clerics' perceptions of, and attitudes toward, their female charges. To recover those perceptions and attitudes, Barr examines Middle English vernacular pastoral literature, concentrating on John Mirk's sermon compilation Festial (c. 1380s) and his manual for pastoral care, Instructions for Parish Priests (c. late-fourteenth century), exploring how the sermons, exempla, and advice it contains might have shaped the thinking of the parish priests for whom it was written.

Barr uncovers a much more complex set of perceptions and attitudes than is commonly assumed. Although clerical misogyny is certainly in evidence in these texts, Barr contends that it is attenuated by the practical day-to-day pastoral concerns they were meant to address. To demonstrate this, she carefully combs through twenty-two extant manuscripts of Mirk's Festial, which she considers to have been the most influential, the one stand-alone manuscript of Mirk's Instructions for Parish Priests (MS Cotton Claudius A II), and numerous other contemporary sermon compilations and pastoral handbooks. Examining the use of gendered language in those texts, Barr shows that gender-inclusive language is consistently used in the discussion of issues pertaining to pastoral care, such as the administration and reception of the sacraments, thus suggesting "a particular concern for female parishioners to experience spiritual care on a more personal and individual level" (p. 43). Her analysis of the exempla incorporated into the sermons, on the other hand, reveals contradictory images of women. Although they tend to reify the stereotype of woman as the daughter of Eve, dependent upon men and sexually lascivious, Barr also finds evidence of more realistic and positive representations of women and the complexities of their lives. Similar contradictions are discovered in the advice dispensed in the manuals of pastoral care, leading Barr to assert that women are presented in at least some Middle English pastoral literature as "ordinary parishioners who posed extraordinary problems for priests" (p. 96).

This study adds new layers of complexity to our picture of the pastoral care of women in medieval England. Barr convincingly argues that Mirk and some other clerical authors of Middle English pastoral literature not only recognized their responsibilities to teach, preach, and care for women. They also acknowledged women's lifecycle stages and their changing pastoral needs according to those stages. Nevertheless, this awareness was tempered by their limited ability to "perceive women outside of their dependence on men and by their continued portrayal of women as sexually dangerous" (p. 19).

This study is also a valuable contribution to the developing field of medieval gender studies. The Pastoral Care of Women in Late Medieval England began life as Barr's doctoral dissertation and still bears some of the marks. The reader is walked carefully through the analysis. Each step is thoroughly explained, exhaustively illustrated, and generously documented, and generalizations and bold assertions are studiously avoided. Although that is often considered a weakness in a monograph, here it is a strength, providing a clear and accessible model of skillful gender analysis. The Pastoral Care of Women in Late Medieval England will make an excellent textbook for college and university courses in the history of pastoral care, medieval church history, and medieval gender studies and women's studies. It will also be a welcome addition to the libraries of scholars in those fields.